SUMMARY: The recession has hit the industrial vacuum system business very
hard. Ross Cook's CEO Mike Fisher says his company would have
"tanked" just as many of his competitors have. One thing saved
him: The great sales leads his revamped Web site is bringing in
every day.

This Case Study details the five step-process Ross Cook went
through to get better listings in search engines, and to make sure
that visitors turn into leads, and leads turn into sales.

When Mike Fisher acquired 78-year old industrial vacuum manufacturer Ross Cook in 1998, the firm had no sales outside of Southern California.

Fisher's home is in Northern California so he naturally wanted to expand to his own area, plus he felt the company had the potential to become a national, and even international player."There was basically no difference between what we made and what our competitors made, aside from the customers' standpoint that nobody had ever heard of us before."

As a former fireman, Fisher had a lot of guts but no marketing or sales experience. "I use common sense and a little street smarts to come up with solutions. Previously I could risk losing lives if I made a bad decision. Now I risked losing a lot of money and putting employees on the street."

Before making any marketing decisions whatsoever, he concentrated on crunching numbers.

"My main goal was, how can I reach the broadest audience of buyers, for $15,000-$25,000 industrial vacuum systems, for the least amount of money. What's my return on each marketing tactic, what's the lead to sales ratio, and how much am I paying per unit I'm selling?"

Ad sales reps from industry magazines soon came calling. "They'd show me data that said 80% of their viewers could be potential customers and that these people still relied on traditional print ads. They're got great data they pop in front of you illustrating this, and down at the bottom of the graph it showed 2-5% of people using the Internet."

Based on these numbers, at first Fisher invested about $60,000 per year in print ads. He began to wonder if those graphs were entirely correct.

"I was starting myself to go out and use the Internet as an engineering resource. It was common sense my buyers would use it too."

Initially he invested a small amount in a "typical" business Web site of that era, which was little more than his printed marketing materials reproduced online.

Sales were pretty good as the economy boomed, but when it faltered in mid-2000, Fisher knew he needed to rethink his marketing strategy to stay afloat in the tough days ahead.

CAMPAIGN

Again he pictured himself in his buyer's shoes. "If I'm the guy I want to reach, what am I doing? Using the Internet is so much faster and easier, there's no way I'm going to waste my time going to a printed catalog or some buyer's guide to try to track down a potential vendor."

He verified this common sense logic by calling a few current customers who told him, "If they happen to pick up one of these publications, they go through them just to get a Web address so they can punch it up."

Fisher knew the vast majority of Web searches start at search engines such as Yahoo and Google, so he wanted to get his site listed as high up as possible with them, and then to turn as many the qualified visitors as possible into sales leads. It turned out to be a five-step process:

Step #1. Researching which keywords qualified buyers use

The only thing worse than not having enough sales leads, is having heaps of worthless unqualified ones.

Fisher decided against getting the site listed in search engines under too-broad terms such as 'vacuum.' "Those searchers may be looking for a Hoover rather than the very specific type of systems we manufacture."

Over a three month period, Fisher and his extended team of sales reps asked every single customer what terms they might use looking for a vacuum system online.

Turned out most people did not search by company name. Instead they typed in a word or two relating to the type of system they were looking for, and hoped a range of manufacturers would come up.

Step #2. Optimizing and positioning the site for search engines

Unfortunately, unless they specifically typed in Ross Cook, nobody would find Fisher's company in search engines.

"We were in some search engines, but we'd be 10 pages back. No one's going to find you if you're not in the top five companies in search results," says Fisher. "I honestly think you've got to be in the top three."

Although he knew he needed outside expertise to get his site ranked higher, Fisher was both wary of and overwhelmed by the options. "There was everything from guys selling $99 software up to $25,000 a month consultants. Many of them were either doing something not entirely right or downright bad -- using s*pam techniques to bolster the rankings of their clients' Web sites."

He adds, "Some guys will sell you that package - I'll guarantee you top spots for a year for $25,000 a month. People actually go out there and spend that kind of money not knowing the risk they are putting their site in for potentially being banned. Can you imagine your site being banned from Yahoo? That would wipe me out. I wouldn't risk it."

In the end he chose to work with a search engine optimization expert allied with an ecommerce site design firm who promised no absolute guarantees. "She was the only person who was really honest with me."

Optimizing and positioning a site involves working with a wide variety of elements, including copy and meta tags, that altogether will suitably impress a search engine robot.

Step #3. Revamping the site to appeal to human visitors

However, you also have to impress human visitors enough that they convert to contacting you for more buying information. Simultaneous with optimization efforts, the ecommerce consultants also revamped the Ross Cook site to improve it for people.

They focused on two areas:

a. Clarifying navigation -- "Some basic site architecture had to change. Our navigation bars were not user-friendly." The team reworded the navigation options to match terms surfers would typically look for. The goal: No buttons with mystery-destinations.

They also removed buttons that few people clicked on to reduce clutter. Fisher says he may remove one further button soon: The 'what's new' link. Turns out busy buyers are not interested. "No one ever clicks on it except the competition."

b. Clearing the deadwood -- Over the years, Fisher had posted more and more graphics and data to the site, until it resembled an overgrown forest of information. Yet, he realized, "I don't have time as a user searching for products to read through a bunch of BS. I want to look at major product offerings, maybe click on one sub-product list and get to the spot I need. Then I want tech specs and data sheets."

"Typically marketers take their printed literature - it's all marketing blah blah - convert it and that's what's on their Web site. Well, most product literature is garbage to begin with! So we got rid of a lot of the site's marketing verbiage, which was mostly stuff we'd been using in print since the '80s."

The team also got rid of every extra graphic element they could that slowed page load time down.

Step #4. Adding a key site element to beat the competition

The radically slimmed-down site worked so well, that Fisher decided to add one final element to get an edge over the competition.

One giant competitor had been gobbling up many of the smaller companies in the field. This burgeoning megalith had an Achilles heel, vastly reduced reaction time to customer enquiries.

"They wouldn't even return phone calls," says Fisher. "Their customer's machines would go down and all the customers' would get was a phone message, 'We'll get back to you next week.' Lead times to get equipment pushed out to an unheard of 12-18 weeks. It was great for me!"

Fisher and his sales reps started noticing that the very first thing inbound callers and emailers would say was, "How fast can you get me equipment?"

He decided to focus his site's sales pitch on the competitor's fatal weakness by adding a giant button to the upper right side of the home page where visitors' eyes are immediately drawn. It reads (typo ours): "5 Day Quick Ship C*lick here for more information"

Step #5. Responding to all Web-driven leads incredibly quickly

Last but not least, Fisher changed procedures when it came to dealing with inbound email from the site.

Instead of having emails go through his customer service department, he diverted them all directly to his own box. He explains why it was critical to take personal control, "The key to success is if you get an email enquiry, you'd better call or respond to that within the first hour. Otherwise you might as well forget it."

"These guys are moving to the first person that responds. They've already emailed three to four competitors, the first one that responds back often gets the business. That's why I get all emails and not somebody else who may not understand how important it is. It's the lifeblood of my company."

Quick responses not only get the order, they can ensure a long term customer relationship. "They're in a total state of disbelief when you do that. Then you've got them for life."

RESULTS

"At least 50% of my new business is as a result ofthem finding me on the Internet, 15% is probably print ads, and the rest is related to local marketing my distributors do," says Fisher. He adds, "100% of my sales leads internationally comes over the Internet."

The Company's vacuum systems are now purchased by buyers across the US and in about a dozen other countries.

Fisher has switched off nearly all of his print advertising. "I was getting maybe two-three qualified leads per week through print ads. It went to about eight-10 qualified leads per day after we optimized the site."

He credits the Web with keeping his company afloat during the recession when many of his competitors have gone under. "The market is hell right now. Our business has stayed somewhat steady. If we hadn't had our search engine marketing, we would have gone in the tank."

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